Hunger strike and the force-feeding chair

Guantanamo Bay and corporeal surrender

Bibliographic Data

ID4475342
AuthorsY Ibrahim (0000-0002-2510-6683, Queen Mary University of London, corresponding author), Anita Howarth (0000-0003-0102-6096, Brunel University of London)
Year2019
Volume37
Issue2
Pages294-312
Publication date2019-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0263775818814537
OpenAlexW2905117131
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited33

Through the biotechnology of the force-feeding chair and the hunger strike in Guantanamo, this paper examines the camp as a site of necropolitics where bodies inhabit the space of the Muselmann - a figure Agamben invokes in Auschwitz to capture the predicament of the living dead. Sites of incarceration produce an aesthetic of torture and the force-feeding chair embodies the disciplining of the body and the extraction of pain while imposing the biopolitics of the American empire on "terrorist bodies". Not worthy of human rights or death, the force-fed body inhabits a realm of indistinction between animal and human. The camp as an interstitial space which is beyond closure as well as full disclosure produces an aesthetic of torture on the racialised Other through the force-feeding chair positioned between visibility and non-visibility. Through the discourse of medical ethics and the legal struggle for rights, the force-feeding chair emerges as a symbol of necropolitics where the hunger strike becomes a mechanism to impede death while possessing and violating the corporeal body

Biopower · Human rights · Political science · Politics · Realm · Sociology · State of exception · Surrender · Torture · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Global Security and Public Health · Law · Torture, Ethics, and Law

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